Melbourne

It is just over six weeks since returning from overseas.  I dropped back into my usual life and have been pretty busy - seems a long time since I left Europe...

I don't go into Melbourne that often but this week I found myself going into the city twice.  On Wednesday Judy and I went into the Gallery to see the Degas Exhibition.  We went to the city a roundabout way - first tried to park at Mitcham, no luck there,  so went further down the line to Glenferrie, where I discovered that the car park was now restricted to two hours.    Continued on to drive to the gallery where parking is a bit pricey, but on the way I decided that Prahan Market would be ideal.  So that was what we did.  Parked at the Market, and got the tram down to the gallery. And it the car park was pretty reasonable.

Waiting for a tram to go the other way, into the city

A interesting thing to do with a VW!

 We spent a quite a long time in the gallery as this exhibition had a lot of paintings and sculptures on display.  Sometimes these exhibition are quite small - this was not one of them.  

By the time we left the city, we were both a bit tired.  It was easy getting the tram back to Prahan, and then driving home.  It was like the old days, when I worked in the city but the building I used to work in had been demolished and there was a new, bigger, and no doubt,  better block of offices being build there.

Then Friday afternoon a lot of us went to a debate which was part of the Melbourne Writers Festival. We listened to Gillian Triggs, president of the Australian Human Rights Commission (who is tearing her hair out at the antics of our woeful government) and Bob Carr, one time Foreign Minister in the Gillard government.  The subject was democracy and it was very interesting.  Triggs thinks it is broken in Australia, but Carr think that it is not too bad, so there were opposing views.